Lead from the Outside summary

For minorities, one of the greatest obstacles to realizing ambition is the conviction that you’re too “other” to be a leader. When Abrams ran for governor, even many of her closest friends and supporters insisted that Georgia wasn’t ready for a Black woman.

It wasn’t for a lack of qualifications. On the contrary: at 29, she was hired as deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta, and five years later, she was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. Just four years after that, she rose to Democratic minority leader. But no Black woman had ever become a major-party gubernatorial nominee before – so it didn’t seem realistic.

In 2014, the Democratic Party had very little power in Georgia. Voters hadn’t elected a Democratic governor in 15 years. They hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in 22. As the minority leader of a small assembly of House Democrats, Abrams couldn’t do much to drive change.

Until she got creative. That year, Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo founded the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit dedicated to registering 800,000 eligible, unregistered voters of color in the state. Getting them on the rolls would change the political landscape of Georgia – which is projected to be the first majority-minority state in the Deep South by about 2026. In the months leading up to election season in 2014, Abrams fundraised $3.5 million and they submitted 86,000 new voter applications.

When Abrams became Atlanta’s deputy city attorney, she wasn’t warmly welcomed by her team. They were a tight-knit crew – and one of them had expected to be promoted to the role before Abrams arrived. Abrams was the youngest member of the law department, she’d come from a corporate tax law firm, and she hadn’t had a leadership role since college.

After weeks of trying and failing to gain their support, an unlikely mentor helped her: the law department’s financial manager, Laurette Woods. Trained in human resources, Woods helped Abrams identify what she was doing wrong: she came off as arrogant in her eagerness to prove she belonged there, and she didn’t make an effort to get to know her colleagues personally. For the next few months, Woods taught Abrams how to establish leadership, manage her employees, and work on her personal touch.

After graduating from Yale Law, Abrams was offered nearly six figures to work at a big corporate law firm. But while her colleagues were buying houses and luxury cars, Abrams was still renting. Sure, her starting salary was impressive – but her credit score wasn’t.

Before beginning her new job, she realized she’d have to submit a personal fitness application as part of the Georgia bar exam – a detailed record of all past missteps, including credit defaults. Throughout her academic career, scholarships had covered her tuition, housing, and fees. But for everything else, Abrams borrowed. Loan money went toward other living costs and helping her family. After all of those expenses, there often wasn’t enough left over to pay her credit card bills.

In her first year as a tax attorney at a private practice, Abrams volunteered to take on an important line of research. The case involved one of the biggest nonprofits in the country, which was facing a tax audit from the IRS. After many hours of poring over laws and codes, Abrams seemed to have found the solution to its problem.

The senior partner scheduled a conference call with the client to share Abrams’s memo. But at the last minute, Abrams noticed a line that she’d skipped – which reinforced the IRS’s opinion and would put the nonprofit in financial jeopardy.

Abrams rejects the pursuit of a work-life balance. According to her, this presupposes that every area of our lives should be granted equal time and attention, which is unrealistic and results in self-loathing when it’s not achieved.

Everyone has to manage surprise obligations sometimes. Life interferes with even the most carefully plotted plans. What Abrams suggests is to accept this reality – and then approach managing your time like a game of Jenga, in which you stack equal-size blocks to form a perfect tower and then pull them out, one by one, re-stacking them on top. Make the best possible strategic moves to keep the metaphorical tower from crashing down – and if it does, build it again.

Creating change is possible even when you lack resources. In fact, the limitations imposed on outsiders and minorities can often help spark creative breakthroughs.

During Abrams’s third year in the Georgia legislature, the Republican majority planned to push a stack of dangerous legislation through on Crossover Day – the day in which bills must pass either the House or the Senate to stay alive during the rest of the legislative season. The Democrats seemed to be out of options. But Abrams had an idea that would obstruct the process, at least a little bit. After checking the rules of the House, she found that every member was allowed to spend 20 minutes questioning each bill. No one usually used all of their time – but if all 75 Democrats spent 20 minutes on all of them, the process would be slowed considerably.